Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/416

402 The cautious and conservative old French savant Quatrefages says the more he reflects, the more he is convinced that man and animals think and reason in virtue of a faculty that is common to both, and which is only far more developed in the former than in the latter. He is very certain that when a cat is trying to catch sparrows on level ground, and creeps along the hollows, availing herself of every tuft of grass, however small, she knows what she is about just as well as the hunter who glides in a crouching attitude from one bush to another. He illustrates dog capacity as follows: "I once had a mastiff of pure breed, and which had attained its full size, remaining, however, very young in character. "We were very good friends, and often played together. As soon as ever I assumed an attitude of defense before him, he would leap upon me with every appearance of fury, seizing in his mouth the arm which I had used as a shield. He might have marked my arm deeply at the first onset, but he never pressed it in a manner that could inflict the slightest pain. I often seized him by his lower jaw with my hand, but he never used his teeth so as to bite me; and yet, the next moment, the same teeth would indent a piece of wood I tried to tear away from them. This animal evidently knew what it was doing when it feigned the passion precisely opposite to that which it really felt; When, even in the excitement of play, it retained sufficient mastery over its movements to avoid hurting me. In reality it played a part in a comedy, and we can not act without being conscious of it."

Sydney Smith exhorts against over-caution. He says: "A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little courage. Every day sends to their graves men who have remained obscure because of timidity. The fact is that, in order to do anything in this world worth doing, we must not stand shivering on the brink and thinking of the cold and danger; but jump in and scramble through as well as we can. It will not do to be perpetually calculating risks, and adjusting nice chances. It did all very well before the flood, when a man could consult his friends upon an intended publication for a hundred and fifty years, and then live to see its success for six or seven centuries afterward. But at present, a man waits, and doubts, and hesitates, and consults his father, brother, cousin, friends, till one fine day he finds that he is sixty-five years of age. There is so little time for our squeamishness that it is no bad rule to preach up the necessity of a little violence done to the feelings and of efforts made in defiance of strict and sober calculation."

The stories of Jonah and Methuselah are—but we should not complain; the faith of an orthodox Brahman is subjected to still severer tests. The sacred authority of the Sama-Veda vouches for the fact that Prince Yudirishi lived 2,300 and his rival Alerka 4,650 years. That is, however, a mere trifle, for a successor of the last-named potentate lived just 66,000 years; and the reader has hardly recovered his breath, when the next chapter informs him that King Yakoyesha lived 2,260,000 years and five months.—("Asiatic Researches," vol. ix, p. 305; compare Buckle's "History of Civilization," vol. i, p. 52.)

Truly Heroic Cures have somehow gone out of fashion. Dr. Hunt, writing in "Lippincott's Magazine," says that Paracelsus cured a leper by keeping him sixty hours in a bath of hot mud (Schrodt's "Analekten," vol. i, p. 106); and when medicine failed to relieve the chronic headaches of Count Philip, of Nassau, his surgeon trepanned his cranium twenty-seven times, and made him sign a certificate to that effect.